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The 2.26.12 Issue

Stella McCartney was born with a platinum spoon in her mouth and is under no pressure to do anything at all. Yet she has worked hard to become quite accomplished in her own right. Hard to find fault with that. It’s a tribute to both her and Sir Paul.

Those shoes. Why do women feel as if they have to teeter around on 4-, 5- or 6-inch heels? Stella is a fashion mogul, a person in power. Could you imagine a man giving up his power by having to focus on walking in shoes like that? It’s the 21st-century version of Chinese foot binding.

“I always say there’s this kind of hidden ghetto side to Stella.” Say what? Stella McCartney sounds lovely. Gwyneth Paltrow? Not so much. I’m rather surprised to learn that they’re such good friends and that Gwyneth Paltrow is an expert on all things “ghetto.”

It’s clear from this story that Scott Ritter has problems. Big problems. He’s a pervert who has earned his stint in jail. . . . Still, it’s interesting to contemplate part of his point here: that no prominent figures who argued for the war in Iraq have suffered for the disaster they visited upon this country. Rick Santorum, a big and unrepentant Iraq war hawk, a senator who voted for the war, is a leading candidate for the G.O.P. nomination. Mitt Romney likes every position on the Iraq war and has among his elite national security advisers two men — Eliot Cohen and Robert Kagan — who were leading Iraq war proponents among the policy elite. The fact that Iraq isn’t even an issue in the G.O.P. primary race tells you that the American public, or at least G.O.P. voters, aren’t interested in learning any lessons from the Iraq debacle.

I saw Scott Ritter as one of the few real heroes in the public sphere for speaking out against the Bush administration’s ginned-up Iraq invasion and subsequent war. He put everything at risk to keep challenging the W.M.D. story line, to avoid war and promote democracy. Unfortunately, he has not been able to combat his personal demons. And like Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer, he somehow misses that his personal acts aren’t done in isolation — those closest to him, those who love him, also pay.

It’s hard to see why a man who is prepared to make up a false identity in order to seek out under-age children should be treated as a heroic truth teller. Yes, the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a serious and damaging national security blunder, but there is no apparent reason why Ritter, with his contempt for inconvenient facts and his penchant for conspiracy theories, should be hailed for getting that right when he got so much else wrong. Ritter clearly remains driven, but his drive is not for truth but for vindication. It’s vindication that he does not deserve.

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I empathize with Etgar Keret’s conflicted feelings about the plight of the hirsute. I have had a beard for more than 20 years. A few years back, eager for some change, I shaved it down to stubble. My 14-year-old son looked at me quizzically. “Different, huh?” I asked. “Not really,” he replied. “I just never realized you had a double chin.” The beard is fuller again and will remain so until my death.

TOM HAYOWYK,Somers, Conn.

A SCORSESE IN LAGOS

While both Hollywood and Nollywood create mainly garbage, Nigerian films are at least exuberant garbage. By contrast, the endless predictable sequels and other dreary “entertainment” commodities that Hollywood churns out are elevated only by their budgets; that is, they are professionally rendered trash. Nigerian films are much more honestly bad. That doesn’t make them any better as “art,” but they do have an innocence that I find admirable. So I applaud the efforts of Kunle Afolayan even as I suspect he will fail to find an audience outside Africa. The larger failure could be if he actually does.

The weakness in an economic system that increasingly demands that young people work for little or nothing is that most of the young people willing to do this come from families that can support them. Far from creating a huge talent pool from which employers can promote top talents, this limits the talent on offer. Not many poor people can afford months of an internship.

ANNE THACKRAY,Toronto

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A version of this letter appears in print on March 11, 2012, on Page MM8 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The 2.26.12 Issue. Today's Paper|Subscribe